(Newser)
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The recession has brought the long '80s boom to an end, but maybe a better America can emerge from the ashes of a self-destructive age of excess, Kurt Andersen writes in a Time cover story. It was plain that the years of giddy growth that started around 1983 had to end sometime, Andersen writes, observing that since the boom began, the average house size grew by half and the average American has put on 20 pounds.

America is now going through a painful withdrawal, Andersen writes, but the pendulum has swung this way before and the country has emerged stronger. Now is the time to come back to reality, Andersen concludes, to ditch our economic, political, and environmental bad habits, and to look forward to a new era "as America plots its reconstruction and reinvention."

I wrote some comments a couple months ago about how Americans lead a life of tremendous excess and greed and I got some defensive idiots responding as if Americans are so humble and modest. You see examples everywhere of Americans consuming and buying completely useless, harmful and oversized crap, which only creates the demand for more of it. And to finance all of that, banks and Wall Street come up with all kinds of fake wealth to feed that hungry beast. It's all intertwined to create this current mess and it took a long time to happen. Big Gulps, oversized Starbucks cups, utensils and plateware getting bigger and bigger, clothes, cars, houses all multiplying in size. Even people getting bigger and fatter and all it does is warp the avg person's idea of what a person should look like. If you're what is medically considered right in size and weight, it's considered skinny and anorexic by obese America and you're told to "put some meat on them bones". One great side effect of this deep recession will be a Great Humbling of the American people.